With hundreds of shows on sale weekly and 3.5 million tickets sold in the last five years, Gigantic is one of the UK’s best-known independent ticketing agencies, selling tickets to big events such as Ed Sheeran, Reading & Leeds and Download Festival.

Driving ticket sales through exciting social media campaigns and engaging with music fans is the responsibility of social media guru, Elizabeth Gracie. She knows exactly what it takes to sell-out shows with social.

“Our most successful social campaign is the introduction of our #GiganticGigGoer family. We aim to build more online relationships with music lovers, encouraging them to share photos, videos and music experiences with each other all in one place.

“This is the start of a great community of gig goers coming together and will lead to bigger things, including competitions, blogs, social media takeovers, interviews and much more. We have received great engagement so far on Instagram, with over 300 gig photos added to the hashtag. This campaign has created around 700 impressions per post and we can only hope it will continue to grow with the growth of our awesome gig goer family.”

1. Have fun

The best advice I have ever been given is to have fun!

It doesn’t matter what you are doing, you are more likely to see benefits and success from applying this at the start. Whether you are content creating, thinking of social strategies, researching your audience or simply just engaging with followers; if you don’t have fun doing it how do you expect your followers/customers to? You’ve got this!

2. Be consistent

Keeping your social media profiles consistent is key to building your online presence successfully. You should consider the tone of voice and the style you want to be recognised by. Make it stand out and stick to it.

A major part of being consistent is making sure you reply to comments, questions and overall engagement - i.e anything you are tagged in. This helps build a community where users feel they can keep coming back, ask a question and get a reply if they need help.

3. Engage

Keeping up with engagement on social media is very important!

Never hesitate to reciprocate and respond to someone who has taken time out of their day to engage with your content. Create relationships and trust with your followers; word of mouth marketing is very successful so give them something to talk about. This will benefit your follower growth more than you realise.

Don’t forget you can be creative with it and use it as a chance to show off your/brands personality by using emojis or gifs, people are more likely to engage if it shows a person behind the account.

4. Effective content

Choosing and creating content can be very overwhelming but remember quality over quantity always wins the race!

Without realising most people tend to scroll through social media platforms without taking anything in. So, you need to stand out with eye catching images that fit the brands aesthetic; using complimenting colour palettes is a good way to start.

Keep up to date with trends but don’t follow them all; be aware of trends that fit you or your brand. You don’t want your followers to get confused with the personality, get bored and unfollow you.

Encourage people to share their experiences with you by using a hashtag you have created or simply tagging your handle; you then have the chance to reciprocate the engagement. By doing this you have access to user generated content (UGC) all in one place; it makes it A LOT easier to locate and share across your channels. The more people you have promoting your brand within their own content, the better!

5. Adjust to the algorithm

With the latest change in a Facebook algorithm it is more important than ever to grow an organic and engaging community. With the reintroduction of family and friend content priority, brands have seen a decline in organic reach. Use this as a chance to use your content to create meaningful interactions. This helps posts get better reach, higher engagement and in turn makes the organic reach much better.

Organic reach has dropped massively with some pages getting as little as 1.5 per cent organic reach to their followers. For example, a page of 100,000 people means only 1,500 of these would see a post organically. If you can build an organic engaging community then that will be much, much higher!

If you use all the points I have made as a foundation for your social media, you will see the benefits. Be consistent, engage, use effective content, adjust to the algorithm and for goodness sake don’t forget to have fun!